The Cute and the Cool
Subtitle: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: March 5, 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780195156669
First sentence: When my son Alex was three years old and on vacation at his grandparents' lakeside cottage, four adults (including myself) conspired to trick him into believing that pirates had stolen his grandmother's jewels.
Description: The cute child - spunky, yet dependent, naughty but nice - is largely a 20th-century invention. In this book, Gary Cross examines how that look emerged in American popular culture and how the cute turned into the cool, seemingly its opposite, in stories and games.